At a Wells Fargo Securities conference earlier this month, an Intel vice president confirmed that Sandy Bridge will have special media acceleration capabilities, in addition to the oft-touted boost in graphics performance.

The Sandy Bridge processor - to be announced January 5 - will pack media acceleration circuitry, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel, confirmed at a Wells Fargo Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference held on November 9-10. CNET reported this capability earlier. Part of the conference - when Smith was speaking - was captured on an audio stream.

"The other cool thing is dedicated circuitry for media acceleration," Smith said, responding to a question from the audience. "All of us in our daily use, whether it's home videos or photos tend to pull things from the Internet, pull things from our own capture devices at home, bring them on to our PC, transform them into different formats... all of that will be dramatically faster if one utilizes this hardware acceleration, media acceleration that we have on Sandy Bridge," he said.

Hopefully this means it will also give a big boost to x264. Would love to be able to encode files faster than is currently available.

EDIT: found another thread on Doom10 that sounds like it might...

harl

12-01-10, 04:10 PM

Hopefully this means it will also give a big boost to x264. Would love to be able to encode files faster than is currently available.

EDIT: found another thread on Doom10 that sounds like it might...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3922/intels-sandy-bridge-architecture-exposed/6
The video encode engine is a brand new addition to Sandy Bridge. Intel is being light on the details of the encoder but we saw a demo where Intel took a ~3 minute 1080p 30Mbps source video and transcoded it to a 640 x 360 iPhone video format. The total process took 14 seconds and completed at a rate of roughly 400 frames per second.

I wonder if the transcode engine will work with P67 chipset or if it will be disabled like with the gpu.